No one has done more than Norman Baynes to clarify our thinking on the later Roman Empire and its spiritual atmosphere, to dispel the mirage of ‘Orientalism’, and to emphasize the sober continuity of Roman thought. So he has stressed the emperor's conscious humanity and dependence upon the supernatural as against excessive inferences from the language of ruler-worship. May I offer to him a few remarks on a phenomenon which might seem to tell on the other side, the description of this or that deity as comes Augusti?

(i) Under Commodus we find a coin-type of 186–9, perhaps of about 189, HERCVLI C[OMIT]I. After a considerable interval SOLI (INVICTO) COM(I)TI (AVGVSTI) appears on issues of Gallienus and Probus. Gallienus has also SERAPIDI COMITI AVG and Probus has Minerva (unnamed, but recognizable) as COMES AVG and COMITI PROBI AVG as well as Hercules (unnamed) with the latter legend. The emperors of Gaul employed the legend; Postumus for Hercules, Neptunus, Serapis, and Victoria; Victorinus for Mars and Victoria (both, it seems, unnamed); Tetricus for the same pair, again without names; Tetricus II for Hercules (named), Minerva, and Victoria; Carausius for Neptunus, Apollo, Minerva, Victoria, and Providentia (Apollo alone named); Allectus for Minerva and Victoria (without names). Constantius Chlorus has comes for Minerva and the Dioscuri (no. names). After his death Sol as comes is frequent on the coins of the tetrarchy, and Hercules (named), Mars and Minerva also have the epithet. Sol still appears as comes under Crispus and Constantine II.

The struggle which the Byzantine government had to wage in the tenth century to protect small freeholders against the landed aristocracy represents a most interesting and important phase in the internal development of the Byzantine State. It can be said without exaggeration that the issue of the struggle determined the very fate of the Empire. The history of this stubborn, dramatic conflict has been outlined more than once. My intention is not to narrate it again, but to illustrate by a few concrete examples the causes which prevented the Byzantine government from effectively safeguarding the smallholder.

The system of land tenure by free peasant proprietors and stratiotai—soldiers settled in the themes—formed the mainstay of the Byzantine Empire from the time of its recovery in the seventh century, as well as its principal source of both internal strength and external power. Naturally, the imperial government intervened in favour of the smallholder when it became clear that peasant and stratiote property was being rapidly absorbed by big landholders, with their former owners becoming serfs on the estates of lay landowners and monasteries. In protecting the smallholder against the encroachments of the feudal landed aristocracy, the State endeavoured to safeguard its soldiers and its best taxpayers, as well as its actual existence; for the development of the centrifugal forces of feudalism constituted a menace to the centralized and autocratic power of the Byzantine emperors.

The author of the Vita Constantini (traditionally and persistently identified with Eusebius, despite the silence of St. Jerome), tells us that Constantine ‘at a banquet he was giving to the bishops declared that he too was a bishop. He added these words which I heard with my own ears: ἀλλ᾽ ὑμεῖϛ μὲν τῶν εἴσω τῆϛ ἐκτὸϛ ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένοϛ ἐπίσκοπϛ ἂν εἴην ’.

In attempts to define the relations between the first Christian emperor and the Church, no phrase is more frequently quoted than this obiter dictum. In the sixteenth century the French scholar Henri de Valois rendered τῶν ἐκτόϛ as if it were the genitive of τὰ ἐκτόϛ, and since then it has been the practice to regard Constantine as an ‘évèque du dehors’: the Emperor either exercised episcopal functions though not consecrated, or supervised mundane affairs (that is, the State), after the fashion of a bishop, or else held from God a temporal commission for ecclesiastical government, the bishops retaining control of dogma, ethics and discipline. Each of these three distinct interpretations is equally admissible.

It is well known that in the various collections of imperial legislation there is only one enactment specifically addressed to Britain, Cod. Theod. XI, 7, 2, of 20th November, 319, to Pacatianus, Vicar of the Britains. It is a short text and may be at one point corrupt, but the general sense is clear: a decurion is liable to pay tax on his own property (whether held ‘in hand’ or occupied by coloni), he is not liable for the property and coloni of another decurion. The text is normally cited by students of Roman Britain to prove that the institutions of the colonate applied to Britain, and this it certainly proves. The purpose of this paper, however, is to inquire whether something more may not be extracted from it.

The principle contained in the law is actually established by legislation of more recent date also included in the Codex Theodosianus. That it appears in the Code at all is due to the hasty and unsystematic way in which the compilers of the Code went to work; legislation was simply collected with little regard to whether it had been repeated or even superseded.

Little more than a decade after Constantine's conversion to Christianity the ancient gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon ceased to appear upon the official coinage and public monuments of the Empire. The personifications—Victoria, Virtus, Pax, Libertas, Securitas, etc., and the ‘geographical’ figures of Res Publica, Roma, Tellus, cities, countries, and tribes—remained. Yet some of these had, up to that very time, received, like the Olympians, their shrines and altars and other honours associated with pagan cultus; and we ask ourselves how it was that a Christian State, while rejecting the one, could retain and ‘baptize’ the other. The answer to this question, which involves the whole complex problem of the nature of pagan religious belief under the later Empire, can only be tentatively suggested here. The pantheon had eventually to go because its denizens had possessed, for the great majority of pagans, a real, objective, and independent existence.

The service books of the Eastern Church contain a large number of monostrophic hymns, or Troparia, which originally followed a verse (στἰχος) from a psalm or canticle, and were therefore also called Stichera. As hymnography developed, their connexion with the content of the Stichos was loosened, and their number increased. The term ‘Sticheron’ was, however, maintained for this new type of Troparion, which was inserted into the Office so freely that it is not surprising to find a great authority on Eastern liturgy speaking of ‘the ivy of poetry’ which had strangled psalmody.

Investigations into the Stichera have not been carried out on a large scale by students of Byzantine hymnography, because they were mainly interested in the study of the two major forms, Kontakion and Kanon. These two, indeed, offered so many problems, both of structure and content, that the study of the vast number of short hymns was set aside. The prevailing opinion that the Stichera were of little or no poetic value contributed to this neglect; and, in fact, many of them are nothing more than slight variations of the text of the preceding verse, and it would be a long task to sort out those Stichera which have literary merit.

Twenty years ago the publication of the Augustan edicts from Cyrene (now SEG 9, 8) was widely believed to have brought final proof that, as Dio asserts (53, 32, 5), Augustus held an imperium which was maius than that of other proconsuls and so enabled him with constitutional propriety to intervene in a senatorial province like Crete and Cyrene. But it may still be thought that the debates which led to this conclusion left certain unnecessary obscurities. If so, the present may perhaps be an appropriate time for an attempt to remove them, because the whole issue has lately been reopened by Mr. Michael Grant in his notable study of the base-metal coinages of the Roman world from 49 B.C. to A.D. 14.

As his is the most recent treatment of the matter, and one which will call for close consideration, it may be well to begin by noticing his conclusions, although the purpose of what is said below does not include any general discussion of the imperium conferred on Augustus. He writes (p. 412) that ‘Caesar's dictatorial imperium which began in 49 B.C. was an imperium maius’, and that ‘an imperium maius … controlled the provinciae of others, and subordinated imperia to an imperium’; and consistently with this he goes on to describe an imperium maius as ‘the revolutionary element which permitted the un-Republican subordination of imperia to an imperium’ (p. 422).